How do judges of the Supreme Court of California reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of California / Joined 1887 / Served to 1908

Thomas B. McFarland

Justice, Supreme Court of California

Thomas B. McFarland was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1887. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1828 · age 198
Tenure: 1887–1908 · 21 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1887	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, McFarland authored 945 published opinions for the court (1887–1908), plus 113 dissents and 124 concurrences. Most cited: Davey v. Southern Pacific Co. (313 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 742 of these were attributed to McFarland by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
1897	Davey v. Southern Pacific Co.· Concurrence†	116 Cal. 325	313
1897	People v. Durrant· Concurrence†	116 Cal. 179	204
1891	City of Pasadena v. Stimson· Concurrence†	91 Cal. 238	178
1888	Sharon v. Sharon· Dissent†	75 Cal. 1	149
1896	De la Montanya v. De la Montanya· Dissent†	112 Cal. 101	146
1896	Peters v. Bowman†	115 Cal. 345	139
1889	Sharon v. Sharon, 11991 (Cal. 7-17-1889)· Concurrence	79 Cal. 633	138
1892	Blythe v. Ayres· Concurrence†	96 Cal. 532	136
1898	People v. Dole· Concurrence†	122 Cal. 486	118
1893	Bury v. Young· Dissent†	98 Cal. 446	109
1905	People v. Cook· Concurrence	83 P. 43	101
1888	San Diego Land & Town Co. v. Neale· Concurrence†	78 Cal. 63	99
1891	Spring Valley Water Works v. Drinkhouse· Dissent†	92 Cal. 528	95
1899	Sheehan v. Sullivan	58 P. 543	90
1897	Schmidt v. Mesmer†	116 Cal. 267	88

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,189 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Supreme Court of California reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Thomas B. McFarland on?: Thomas B. McFarland was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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21 years on the Supreme Court of California. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).